Posts tagged with: resolutions

I'm shifting focus from infrastructure and research to solutions and customer projects.

All right, this post could easily have become another rant about the ever-growing complexity of RDF specifications, but I'll turn it into a big shout-out to the Semantic Web community instead. After announcing the end of investing further time into ARC's open-source branch, I received so many nice tweets and mails that I was reminded of why I started the project in the first place: The positive vibe in the community, and the shared vision. Thank you very much everybody for the friendly reactions, I'm definitely very moved.

Some explanations: I still share the vision of machine-readable, integration-ready web content, but I have to face the fact that the current approach is getting too expensive for web agencies like mine. Luckily, I could spot a few areas where customer demands meet the cost-efficient implementation of certain spec subsets. (Those don't include comprehensive RDF infrastructure and free services here, though. At least not yet, and I just won't make further bets). The good news: I will continue working with semantic web technologies, and I'm personally very happy to switch focus from rather frustrating spec chasing to customer-oriented solutions and products with defined purposes. The downside: I have to discontinue a couple of projects and services in order to concentrate my energy and reduce (opportunity) costs. These are:

The ARC website, mailing list, and other forms of free support. The code and documentation get a new home on GitHub, though. The user community is already thinking about setting up a mailing list on their own. Development of ARC is going to continue internally, based on client projects (it's not dying).

Trice as an open-source project (lesson learned from ARC)

Semantic CrunchBase. I had a number of users but no paying ones. It was also one those projects that happily burn your marketing budget while at the same time having only negative effects on the company's image because the funds are too small to provide a reliable service (similar to the flaky DBPedia SPARQL service which makes the underlying RDF store look like a crappy product although it is absolutely not).

Knowee, Smesher and similar half-implemented and unfunded ideas.

Looking forward to a more simplified and streamlined 2011. Lots of success to all of you, and thanks again for the nice mails!